Semiconductor devices typically require thin oxide layers to be formed at various stages of their fabrication. For example, in transistors, a thin gate oxide layer may be formed as part of a gate stack structure, including sidewalls, as will be described further below. In addition, in some applications, such as in the fabrication of a flash memory film stack, a thin oxide layer may be formed surrounding the entire gate stack, for example, via exposing the stack to an oxidation process. Such oxidation processes have conventionally been performed either thermally or using a plasma.
Thermal processes for forming oxide layers, for example, the gate oxide layer or the gate stack oxidation layer, have worked relatively well in fabrication of semiconductor devices of the larger feature sizes used in the past. Unfortunately, as feature sizes are becoming much smaller and different oxides are employed in the next generation of advanced technologies, the high wafer temperatures often required in thermal oxidation processes are problematic in that the dopants in the silicon wafer (well doping and junctions) diffuse at the higher temperatures (e.g., above about 700° C.). Such a distortion of the dopant profiles and other features can lead to poor device performance or failure.
Plasma processes used to form oxide layers have similar problems. For example, at high chamber pressure (e.g., 100 mTorr), contaminants tend to accumulate in the gate oxide layer during formation, leading to fatal defects in the gate oxide structure such as dangling bonds or mobile charge, and at low chamber pressure (e.g., tens of mTorr), increased plasma ion energy leads to ion bombardment damage and other diffusion problems. For example, conventional oxidation processes often result in a defect known as a bird's beak. Bird's beak refers to diffusion of the oxide layer into the layers of the film stack structure from the sides at the interface between adjacent layers, rounding off the corners of the adjacent layers. The resultant defect has a profile that resembles a bird's beak. The intrusion of the oxide layer into the active region of the memory cell (e.g., in flash memory applications) reduces the active width of the memory cell, thereby undesirably reducing the effective width of the cell and degrading the performance of the flash memory device.
Another limitation of current low temperature plasma processes is that oxidation appears to occur preferentially on surfaces parallel to the wafer plane, namely, the top of the stack and bottom of trenches. It is believed that this is due to the flux of oxygen ions and radicals perpendicular to the wafer. Regardless of the cause, limited oxidation occurs on the sidewalls of the stacks, resulting in an unacceptably thin sidewall layer on the gate stacks. Thus, there is a need for an improved method for forming oxide layers on semiconductor substrates.